Christians come under attack in Egypt

Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood protest in Giza Square, south of Cairo (CNS)

Reports suggest up to 58 Christian churches have been targeted by Islamists since military crackdown

It has been reported that since the start of the military crackdown in Egypt up to 58 Christian churches have been damaged or destroyed by Islamists.

Egypt’s Catholic Church has published a list of the affected churches, as well as a commentary by the country’s leading Jesuit criticising the West’s characterisation of “poor persecuted Muslims”.

On Sunday, after five days of “terrorist attacks, killings and the burning of churches, schools and state institutions,” Coptic Catholic Patriarch Ibrahim Isaac Sedrak, president of the Council of Catholic Patriarchs and Bishops in Egypt, thanked “our honorable Muslim compatriots who have stood by our side, as far as they could, in defending our churches and our institutions.”

The Associated Press reported that nearly 1,000 people had been killed in violence between security forces and Morsi supporters. The violence began last week after security forces raided camps set up by those loyal to the former president.

In the ensuing days, stories began emerging of attacks against Christian institutions. As far back as December, Islamists had been accusing Christians of being the predominant force behind the protests against Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, who took office in mid-2012. Some observers said Christians were uncomfortable with the politicised Islam that was emerging under Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party.

Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II and Egypt’s grand imam, Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, appeared alongside General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during his televised announcement on July 3 that Morsi had been removed from office, increasing the impression of Christian involvement in what some termed a military coup and others described as the military enacting the will of the people.

The Christian Science Monitor reported in mid-August that in one Egyptian village, red marks were still visible from where Christian houses were marked in red graffiti in late June as residents vowed to protect Morsi’s legacy.

After last week’s military crackdown, angry extremists throughout Egypt seemed to target Christians and police, although moderate Muslim institutions were also targeted.

Internet photos of two Christian churches attacked in Mallawi, in Minya, a province south of Cairo where Christians make up around 35 percent of the population, showed decapitated statues, burned courtyards and door frames, sacked and burned church offices and piles of rubble.

Auxiliary Bishop Botros Fahim Awad Hanna of the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria posted photos of people praying in burned-out churches.

In a widely published interview with the Associated Press, Franciscan Sister Manal, principal of a school in Bani Suef, told of a six-hour ordeal in which a mob broke into the school, stole all computers and furniture and set multiple fires. At times, she told AP, she was overcome by fumes from the fire and tear gas from police. She said the mob knocked the cross off the street gate and replaced it with a black banner resembling the al-Qaida flag.

Sister Manal said the school educated about equal numbers of Christians and Muslims, so when a parent who was a police officer had warned her the school was targeted by extremists, she did not pay attention.

After the attack, the extremists paraded Sister Manal and two other nuns through the streets before a Muslim, a former teacher at the school, offered them shelter.

The list of attacks published by the Coptic Catholic Church included a Franciscan-run church and school in Suez and three Catholic churches, a monastery and school damaged and burned in Assiut. Four Catholic churches, a convent and school in Minya, as well as a convent of Sisters of St Mary in Cairo, were also according the website, which blamed “the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of Mohammed Morsi, the former Egyptian president.”

Meanwhile, 35 Coptic Orthodox and Protestant churches were attacked in various towns and cities, as well as an Anglican church in Suez.

Six Christian sites were burned by crowds in Fayoum and five others in Sohag, said the report, which added that all the incidents had been “verified by representatives of the Christian churches.”

Christian homes, shops and hotels were also looted in Minya, el-Arish, Assiut and Luxor, along with offices of the ecumenical Bible Society in Cairo, Assiut and Fayoum.

In a commentary on the Coptic Catholic Church’s website, Jesuit Father Henri Boulad, who directs the Jesuit Cultural Center in Alexandria, Egypt, criticised Western reactions to the military clampdown against the Muslim Brotherhood and accused governments and media of also failing to condemn the killing of Christians.

He said a mosque in Cairo’s Rabaa district had been turned into “a veritable powder-house” and “revolting arsenal of war,” while Muslim Brotherhood members, “armed to the teeth,” had “spread terror throughout the population of Egypt” with “murders, abductions, ransom demands, thefts and rapes.”

“Now the West is outraged, shocked and scandalised because the Egyptian army has dared dislodge the Muslim Brothers. Poor Muslim Brothers, victims of violence,” said the 82-year-old priest, a former Middle East Jesuit provincial and former head of Caritas in Egypt.

The priest said the June 2012 election of Morsi had been a “vast masquerade,” characterised by “enormous fraud,” adding that 1,500 Egyptians had since been “massacred by Morsi’s militias.”

“When Egypt finally decides to react and bring some order to this mess, the West cries about persecution, injustice and scandal,” Father Boulad said in his commentary.

Comments

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SimonS

Nothing good will come of this.

If the Morsi regime had survived, incremental restrictions and persecution of Christian (well, non Sunni muslim) communities would have continued to build.

As the regime has been brought down, this is being taken out on these Christian communities.

It is very much a lose-lose situation for the Christian communities there. I retain hope, as always, that a solution will be found to this senseless bloodshed, but in reality I can see little that can be done in the short term that will not make things worse. Very depressing.

Romanus

After recanting Christianity, the West is silent as it doesn’t want to bring back memories of the Crusades… the hedonist, narcissist West would rather let the Copts eat cake rather than being perceived as taking sides…

NatOns

As with the Jews under the rigours of Nazi ideology of scientific racism the objective was indeed to offer them (and any who dared to sympathise with them) a lose-lose situation. The Muslim Brotherhood and its ideological version of theological purity is not Nazism, of course, it is a confusion of, a misunderstanding of, an erroneous application of Judeo-Christian belief; it is a Christian heresy, rather than one that is scientific (sic) or political. Here we see mirrored before our own faces a puritan heresy in all its violently expressed logic, it is the Church Militant run wild (with an infantile or youthful anger); it is Judas Maccabeus and the Maccabean martyrs gone bad, the Byzantine imperial crusade turned sour, the Auto-de-Fe made essential (not reactionary); here we see an irrational desire to confront some perceived error, falsehood, compromise, no longer wrapped up safely in a vortex of debate but unleashed in this all-consuming fury ..

Benedict Carter

The good thing is that there are at least ten million Copts. If the worst happens, they have more than enough young men to conduct a very serious defence of themselves. That’s the reality.

Thomas Poovathinkal SSP

THE LORD is our STRENGTH. He is our DEFENDER. Lord have mercy on us ALL.
Son of God, BE with your People.

Thomas Poovathinkal SSP

http://jabbapapa.wordpress.com/ Julian Lord

Surprisingly, USA Today is actually COVERING this anti-Christian violence, which is a pleasant surprise !!

The bias of western media in not reporting the violence against christians, not only in the Middle East, is reprehensible. I think they are blinded by PC/multi-culti glasses. Some cultures (or even religions) are inferior. Some are detrimental to what we’d now call progress. But if it occurs within a certain group, well shoulders are shrugged because, afterall, we just can’t expect them to behave like real humans.

TieHard

The Muslim Brotherhood and its ideological version of theological purity is not Nazism……
NO….but does it share something with it … that can be classified and named?

NatOns

Yes, and easily. The idolatry of ideology; making an idea a god before God is of the worse heresies .. it is a sin against the Holy Ghost. I am not sure many today understand that to work against (or even believe contrary) to moral reason is not merely a mistake in valued tastes – it is wrongdoing, that is, it is ‘sin'; and not just any old wrong done, it is an obdurate affront to the very breath of Life which animates mankind .. unlike angels or beasts or matter.

ambuzzzephier@yahoo,com

talk is nothing but just that talk, and if no solutions are presented, then talk is nothing more than cheap…there is only one solution and that is for all people of ‘Good Will’ to unite for one purpose only; to rid all lands of these brain-washed terrorists who like dogs with rabies cannot be reasoned with. If this action is not taken then you, I and everyone else who sits back and allows it might just as well join those uneducated excuses for human beings who kill in the name of a Liar and his lies…

ambuzzzephier@yahoo,com

speak the ‘truth’! These murderers sin against ETERNAL GOD MOST HOLY BLESSED DIVINE SPIRIT by their choosing to live and to die in the name of ‘HATRED’ this is the ‘SIN’ of which you speak…!!

ambuzzzephier@yahoo,com

easily, 1) hatred of the Jewish People and, 2) Mass Murder now I have a question for both of you intellectuals: Should they be stopped at all costs?

ambuzzzephier@yahoo,com

go explain all of this to those families of the relatives of theirs who are being killed, see if they care what you are saying…do you think they would care?

ambuzzzephier@yahoo,com

in what manner? against the terrorists or with them? I, for one, have no idea this is the reason for my question; are they for or against it? USA Today?

ambuzzzephier@yahoo,com

my question for you tommy is this: Do we as Christians have a GOD GIVEN RIGHT to Protect Ourselves and Our Loved Ones from death by accident, illness or violence with intent to kill?””

NatOns

Not at all costs, for damnation of one’s soul is not a price any servant of the Lord should contemplate – in seeking to oppose patent evil. Yet opposition to a tyrant, if necessary to the salvation of souls – or even the preservation of their mortal lives – is a forgiveable sin; as with Hilter’s Satanic hatreds. And, though not popular in today’s mealy-mouthed manners, the Just War ethic of Crusade is sufficiently distinct from the Holy War of Islam against the sinful world, or Judaism, for that matter, against the sinning peoples of the Land to be a true contrast; for that justification is not one’s own grievances redressed but Justice (even toward a blind destroyer of the Just).

NatOns

The wrong done must be ‘hated’, yes, that is abhorred; the wrongdoer must not be loathed however detestable his actions, or we too engage in wrongdoing = sin.

TieHard

intellectuals?

Thomas Poovathinkal SSP

Better you seek the answer from the Lord himself. He is the only true Teacher. I don’t want to be an unfortunate one to take the Lord’s place. I my self am a seeker. The Lord is my Teacher and God. When we go him with pure hears he accepts us as his own.